Many rock stars of a certain vintage are in a look-don’t-touch phase as late autumn descends on their careers.
Then there’s Iggy Pop. The 63-year-old singer with the perpetually naked, perpetually sinewy torso is just fine if the fans want to touch and even manhandle the merchandise. In fact, he encourages it, the crowd’s enthusiasm a necessary ingredient in what is routinely the best show in town on whatever night in whatever city he happens to be playing.
In a filled-to-the-gills Riviera on Sunday (after the show was moved from the larger Aragon), Pop was still in stage-diving, microphone-hurling, room-wrecking mode with the latest reconstituted version of his ‘70s proto-punk band the Stooges. The current lineup includes James Williamson, who has spent the last 30 years as a computer programmer in California. But Williamson wrote much of the music that propelled the Stooges’ most popular album, the 1973 release “Raw Power,” and his presence was apparent from the get-go.
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3.5 stars (out of 4)
Since the ‘60s, when he helped Fairport Convention fuse rock and British folk music, Richard Thompson has been one of our time’s mightiest guitar gunslingers. His style is rarely predictable, making connections to bagpipe drone, free-jazz harmonics and psychedelic studio effects (pretty cool how he can sound like he’s playing a “backward” solo while going full speed ahead).
But he’s relatively under-celebrated as a great soloist, in part because he puts an equal if not greater premium on songwriting, often muting his instrumental capabilities to serve his literate, lacerating songs. At times this has led to albums that can appear a little dry, easy to respect but short on the kind of goosebump-inducing peaks he’s capable of conjuring in concert.
With “Dream Attic” (Shout! Factory), he attacked that problem by recording his latest batch of originals on the road with his touring band. Coincidental or not, the setting opens things up considerably for Thompson the guitarist, his songs gaining an immediacy and intensity that sometimes gets refined away in his sometimes too-careful studio recordings.
The songs have an edge to them, as well, as he skewers shifty financiers in “The Money Shuffle” and Sting in “Here Comes Geordie” (“Good old Geordie, righteous as can be/Cut down the forest just to save a tree”). “Sidney Wells” is another Thompson character study that leaves a trail of blood in its wake. Though the saxophone solos should’ve been skipped, Thompson’s pliable quintet is generally in good form, slipping confidently into various guises (folk-based ballads and elegies, roadhouse rockers, shape-shifting epics). But it’s really an album about Thompson and his ability to turn traditional notions of a guitar solo inside out. He comes across as a cool head in his narratives and meditations, but his reserve boils over when his hands touch the strings. Soft-spoken resolve erupts with a vengeance on “If Love Whispers Your Name,” the clinical detail of “Crimescene” turns into a flashback of mayhem, and the dark humor of “Bad Again” breaks into a room-wrecking romp. “I’m bad again,” Thompson exults, and that’s reason to celebrate.
greg@gregkot.com
For Bruce Springsteen fans, Nov. 16 is shaping up as a banner day. That’s when Columbia Records will release “The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story,” a box set focusing on what many Springsteen aficionados consider his most vital period as a recording and touring artist.
The box will include three CDs, including a remastered version of the original album plus a bevy of outtakes, 21 unreleased songs among them, according to an announcement Thursday from the Springsteen camp. It also will hold three DVDs containing six hours of live and studio footage, including a 1978 Houston concert when Springsteen and the E Street Band were in the midst of their most storied tour and a 90-minute documentary that will debut at the Toronto Film Festival next month. An 80-page book containing images of Springsteen’s original lyrics and notes from the sessions will also be part of the package. The set will also be available in vinyl and Blu-Ray configurations.
"Darkness" marked the centerpiece of a particularly prolific era for Springsteen, with more than 70 songs in play for the eventual 10-song album. Some of the outtakes made it on to later albums, but a few are surfacing only now, including "Save My Love for You," which is being streamed on Springsteen's Web site HERE. It's the type of song that could've been a career-starter for many artists, but for Springsteen it was just another day in the studio.
Here’s a list of the bonus songs to be included in the set, including Springsteen’s version of “Because of the Night,” which became a hit for its coauthor, Patti Smith:
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Iggy Pop and James Williamson in London, 1972. (Courtesy of Columbia Records)
When Iggy Pop and the Stooges played their final concert in 1974, Pop was knocked cold by a bottle hurled from a hostile audience. The band disintegrated amid broken glass, blood, drugs and ill will.
Yet over the last few decades, the lasting validity and impact of the Stooges’ three studio albums –
“The Stooges” (1969),
“Funhouse” (1970) and
“Raw Power” (1973) – has been recognized, and Pop has become a punk godfather. At 63, he’s one scary godfather, too, the type of performer who still leaves overturned speaker cabinets, shattered microphone stands and blown minds wherever he goes.
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1 star (out of 4)Katy Perry seems like a likable enough goofball, the kind of diva whose flashy trash fashions and offbeat humor promise something more interesting than formula pop.
But formula pop is exactly what she dishes out on her second album,
“Teenage Dream” (Capitol), split between girls-gone-wild cliches and melodramatic power ballads. The Frankenstein-like productions – the latest gleaming, assembly-line product by usual suspects Dr. Luke, Max Martin, Tricky Stewart and Stargate, among others --- sap the music of personality, presence, surprise.
Too often she sounds robotic, like a wind-up toy incapable of singing with any elegance or nuance. She either stutters for effect (“E.T.”) or lands on the beats so emphatically (You! Make! Me! Feel-like-I’m-livin’-a! Teen! Age! Dream!) that it’s almost comical. The production does her no favors, giving her lines a pasted-together artificiality. Singing ability is not a prerequisite for making great pop music, but original ideas and inventive presentation are -- and both are lacking.
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Slayer, Megadeth and Testament -- three bands that helped reinvent metal in the ‘80s -- drew nearly a full house Friday inside the steamy UIC Pavilion, defying age and gravity to play sets that hit hard and fast, brutality delivered with a sinister smile.
“They were louder in Detroit,” Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine sneered as the fans shouted a chorus back at him, then broke into a grin when the fans responded to his taunts with even greater gusto. “That’s more like it.”
The three bands share much in common: roots in the seedier, punkier side of California’s metal scene, an emphasis on velocity as well as heaviness; Apocalyptic lyrics about death, war and religious oppression; a taste for street clothes instead of standard rock-star duds; and a disdain for theatricality, frilliness and poodle haircuts.
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